A Family Madness (11 page)

Once I ran, looking the other way, shoulder-first into Ganz, who grabbed me by the shoulders and clamped me to his chest. He wasn't wearing his coat and his shirt was white and fragrant. I could smell his perfume, a mild, male-smelling perfume, and behind it a further musk. This must be the way warriors smell, I naively thought. He released me only to clamp me by both ears again and drag me nose-first against his chest. “Little Radislaw Kabbelski,” he said emphatically. “You are a blessed child. Let Onkel Willi wish that in all the world's blood and lies you will hear only kindly voices.” Then he kissed my forehead and let me go. I could not have been happier if he had elected me President.

Later that same delightful day I skidded around the edge of a knot of berry bushes to find one of Ganz's soldiers urinating there, a man nearly as old as Ganz, one of Ganz's headquarters people detailed to guard our picnic against the remote chance that a few of the world's last Communists should decide to attack it.

“Forgive me, mein Herr,” he said, buttoning as fast as he could.

That also was why we came back. To be mein Herr in our own country. I decided to show the soldier that I was indeed a person of influence. “Is Sergeant Jasper here today?” I asked in German. I had—like many Eastern Europeans of the era—four languages. “Not today, mein Herr,” said the soldier.

Sergeant Jasper was the only German I had seen weeping that triumphant summer. I felt so endowed with authority at Ganz's picnic that if Jasper had been in the forest I would have gone to him and asked him what had been upsetting him, more or less inquire why he was marring this golden time. Jasper was an NCO from German Army Intelligence and had been attached to my father's staff. If any left-behind Russians were found in the woods by my father's navy-blue-clad policemen, Jasper was to interrogate them. Any captured Bolshevik partisans and bandits were also to be milked by Jasper. Earlier in the summer I had heard my father praising him to my mother. A bright boy, said my father. It was a pity he wasn't commissioned, my father declared, because it diminished his standing with the SS officers.

There had been a party at our house the night before the picnic. It had been a really big affair to honor certain SS and SD officials from Minsk.

Among the guests of whom even I was aware was an SS man all the way from Riga, another from the Kaunas office of that same Reich Security Central Office which had paid all our hotel bills on the Baltic, and Dr. Kappeler, an important section head in the Ministry of the East, or Ostministerium.
Local
diginitaries included the aging, heavy-drinking garrison commander of our town (who my father thought was a fool, but he knew that everyone in the German Army who was not a fool was presently in front of Moscow); our Kommissar, the beloved Willi Ganz; my father's deputy Beluvich, an old faithful of the Belorussian dream, my father said, for whom the great chance had come too late; Mr. Kuzich, our mayor; and the head of the Staroviche Gestapo.

Everyone seemed to have brought a wife or a lady friend except Oberführer Ganz, and to an eight-year-old boy Ganz's failure in this regard was a generous sign that the people he had really come to see were my mother and Genia and me.

One of the minor guests was Sergeant Jasper, who came earlier than anyone else and asked the servant who opened the door if he could see my father. My father came downstairs at last and gave Jasper an interview in the study, from which they emerged just in time for my father to greet the other guests. Genia and I were allowed to pass around the trays of hors d'oeuvres, a trick which brought inordinate applause from all the visitors. Even as we toted the trays we kept our eyes on two men—Beluvich, my father's deputy, and Ganz—for they were the prodigious drinkers in the company. Beluvich and Mrs. Beluvich drank vodka in a quiet, industrious way until their faces bleared and they could not finish sentences. Then they would try to light cigarettes—that was the comedy sequence Genia and I did not want to miss.

Ganz drank cognac, and instead of blunting him it seemed to refine him, till his eyes were glittering and all the women gathered around him to listen to his jokes. All the other German officers were more restrained, even the youngers ones, as if they were under orders not to drink too much or yield to Ganz's liveliness. I took their resistance as only another instance of the astounding tedium of adults.

In the crush I did not notice Jasper at all.

Genia and I did not have a place at the table, but we watched from the hallway, from the bottom of the stairs, while the Catholic bishop of Staroviche blessed the food. The Orthodox bishop had, to everyone's surprise, after some years of persecution by the NKVD and a jail sentence, left with the retreating Soviets, and a new bishop had not yet been elected. The bishop's departure was taken as a sign of a characteristically Russian perversity, of the same type shown by those two slaughtered Russian brigades who lay along the Baranovichi road.

After the grace everyone sat. My father drank his borscht very quickly, made excuses to the Ostministerium man from Kaunas on his right and the SS man from Minsk on his left, and rose to call his chief servant, an ancient and loyal Belorussian whom he had found in Staroviche when he first arrived with the officers of Vorkommando Moscow, just behind the first wave of panzers. We saw my father whisper at the old man and point out an empty space at the bottom of the table. We realized it was Sergeant Jasper's place and that Father was sending the servant to find him. This qualified with me as delicious drama, as it did also with Genia, though she tried not to admit it.

We followed the servant as he went searching down the corridor, in my father's study, in the solarium. He opened the kitchen door, and Genia and I recognized there—among a number of other drivers, military and civilian—Kommissar Ganz's chauffeur Yakov drinking coffee. Most of the Jews of Staroviche lived in a barricaded section of town. I found out later that there were more than eight thousand of them crammed in there, between Braslawski Street and the river. Yakov was one of the few who had outside jobs and lived outside the barricade. He sat quietly among the SS chauffeurs, not volunteering his name.

But Jasper wasn't in the kitchen. The old servant, with the Kabbelski children in pursuit, found him on the top landing near my bedroom, sitting on the floor, his collar unbuttoned, a flask of spirits between his knees and weeping awesomely, steadily, stuttering and stammering his grief, on and on.

The servant began to speak to him and Jasper answered quietly. We heard him say, “The children, the children,” a number of times, and we began to fear he meant us. We must have given off a flurry of alarm, because the old servant turned to us—he was discovering for the first time that we were behind him—and hissed, “Clear out. He's not talking to you.”

In the context of that glorious evening, with the prospect of tomorrow's picnic, it astounded me that anyone under our roof could be unhappy.

I remember Jasper now more as a representative of that generation of Europeans who were all forced at great pace to learn a fierce amount about themselves and their fellows during those years in the furnace.

13

“Listen,” Stanton said outside the Kabbels' place at the end of a shift. The first frostiness of the season was in the air, and Delaney liked that, the arrival of daylight brought with it more the elation of survival. “Listen, you reckon that girl and her brother might be making it together?”

Delaney, gouging for car keys in his pocket, stiffened. He wanted both to hide his face and hit Stanton. Instead he heard himself ask why.

“I went for a leak,” said Stanton, “and the outside toilet's buggered, so I used the one in the house. All these paintings of the two of them done by Warwick himself. She's wearing the security company's bloody baggy shirt and they're staring at the bloody camera—or at the brush I suppose you'd say. And there's a wave behind them. He's bloody good at waves, gets the marbling exact.” By now Stanton was speaking more hesitantly. He could tell his theory had somehow outraged Delaney; he was abashed at having violated some sensitivity in his friend. Then he got peevish. “Christ, you might as well know these things.”

“In case of what?” There was an ashy dryness—disappointment and the rasp of jealousy—at the back of his throat. Later he would remember this as the first second he would think of himself as her deliverer.

“In case you … No, I'm not going to bloody buy in, Terry. I'll show you my scars, if you want. This is the same sort of setup as the one that uprooted my life. It's like playing Rugby League in France—you think you know the rules but you don't.”

He would have liked to ask Stanton whether his love was so clear, like a mark on the forehead that Gina, her parents, his parents could read. But the question itself would be a giveaway.

In the opening chapter of
The Tin Drum
a man is running from the Prussian police in a potato field somewhere around the borders of Poland and Germany. Delaney intended at some stage to look up the location more exactly, but felt no urge to, preferred in fact for the young fugitive's politics to be vague and for the location to be no man's land, a land still to be invented. To escape the police, the escapee slides in under the skirts of the narrator's grandmother, who at that stage of history is still young and is picking potatoes in the field. While the Prussian police run back and forth among the furrows, the hidden escapee exploits his privileged position by entering the girl/grandmother. She flushes as the police rage up and down the furrows. She has met her man.

This event recurred in Delaney's sleep. He was running from the persecutors who inhabit dreams, the persecutors who require neither names nor motivation. In he rushed, beneath the succoring skirts. Under them lay Danielle Kabbel's bird-boned yet ample flesh. To reach it was to reach home, a stranger home than he had ever known to exist.

These days he drove to work agitated, trying to get there before Stanton, usually succeeding. “The punctual Mr. Delaney,” she told him one night when she was already in the control room and he did not have to go through the boyhood thing of waiting for the particular fragrance of Danielle Kabbel, for that particular gait, a step both more familiar and less robust than Gina's.

“The punctual Mr. Delaney. If my father had his way, you'd be managing director inside a month.”

“But you don't have a managing director.”

“No,” she said, smiling deftly. “We only have the family.”

She had begun reading and writing notes in a new book, a slimmer one, Graham Greene's
Our Man in Havana
. He knew the film—Maureen O'Hara aging elegantly and giving off a high-bred sexual radiance. He remembered the fun and trickery of the plot, and wondered what in her strangeness she thought of it. Later, out shaking doorknobs and shining a torch at mute panes of glass, he fell back on what he knew of the book as a sort of irrational proof of innocence. The atmosphere of the story was homely, humane: There were heroes and villains. Whereas in
The Tin Drum
there were escapees sheltering in weird and joyous places; a mother and an uncle loved each other; midgets could break glass with their voices; horses' heads squirmed with eels; and a woman ate herself to death with fish oil. In the dark atmosphere of
that
book, adding its power to the dark wave in Warwick's paintings—as reviewed for Delaney by Stanton—you could nearly believe in Stanton's accusation. But not by the calmer light of
Our Man in Havana
.

One night when he arrived, the whole known Kabbel family were gathered in the control room around one of those little machines called scanners. Warwick the artist was tuning the controls with calm, delicate movements involving only his index finger and his thumb. Stammers of distorted conversation emerged from the scanner and faded back into static and noises resembling a saxophone played by an inexpert child. The family was so riveted around the thing that Delaney hesitated at the door and considered going away for five minutes. Then Danielle turned her head. She was frowning as if she wanted to help the circuits inside the machine with her concentration. Then her eyes focused, her eyebrows arched, and she smiled, making Delaney welcome to whatever the secret was. A second later Kabbel looked over his shoulder. His eyes glittered. He grinned and waved at Delaney to come closer. When Delaney had crossed the room, Kabbel slung his arm around his shoulder.

“Warwick's been engaged in counterespionage,” Kabbel whispered, not wanting to be so loud as to cloud anything definite Warwick could get from the scanner. “Like his grandfather the chief of police.” Dressed as a Telecom technician, Warwick had managed to get into the office of Rooster Time, the company at war with Golden Style. He'd even been permitted into the garage, where, left alone for a few minutes, he broke into the managing director's BMW and took the number of his car telephone. Kabbel had reason to suspect that the managing director made contact with those who were breaking Golden Style's windows and spray-painting its brickwork and parking areas with offputting slogans like “Chicken Poison” and “Shit Food,” while he was driving to and from the office.

“How do you know he isn't already home?” Delaney asked. “Watching
Country Practice
with his kids?”

Kabbel winked, a broad Slavic wink, heavily supported by the rest of his features. “Scott put a bug in his office a month ago. Ten minutes ago our gentleman called his wife and told her he'd be home in half an hour.”

Delaney frowned. Electronic subterfuge disturbed him. The family looked sinister with their intent, genetically echoing postures around the scanner.

Kabbel increased the pressure on Delaney's shoulder. “Don't start fretting. I'll never use you for any of these rascal activities.” And then, as if he could spot the growing question in Delaney's eyes, “Nor do I ever use Danielle. You and she are both too good at what you already do, and that's fair enough with Rudi Kabbel. Warwick, Scott, and I are the partisans, the guerrillas, the outlaws.”